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Comment by panarky | Hacker News Reader

The rational profit-maximizing strategy is to minimize spending on routine maintenance and winterization, which predictably results in supply that will occasionally fail catastrophically, and then pocket billions in windfall profits during each catastrophe.

If the state's objective is to maximize corporate profits at the expense of ratepayers, they have succeeded.

But if the objective is to reduce the frequency of catastrophes, the state might consider reducing the incentive to produce catastrophes.

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> If the state's objective is to maximize corporate profits at the expense of ratepayers, they have succeeded.

welcome to republican lead texas that deregulated the power grid and decided to isolate the grid instead of playing well with others.

Unless all of your company's generators go down and you have to buy from another company to supply your fixed-rate customers, then you'll lose your shirt. Or if you tried to cheap out and always buy at market rate.

From your statement it sounds like profit maximization is anything but rational

Are you sure about that? Because people often come up with theories about how the capitalists are about to abandon everyone to their fate and then it turns out capitalism leads to Waffle House [0]. It makes capitalist sense to do disaster planning.

There needs to be evidence that the incentives point to scrimping on maintenance. Usually the incentives for capitalists is to preserve their capital and keep it is great repair. The is a strong, rational incentive to solve problems like winterisation because the revenue is higher than normal if someone can (and potential profits are much higher). Capitalism will just try to do it cheaply and to a standard that customers are happy with rather than in a politically showy fashion with gold plated "see I've thrown the kitchen sink at this!" style. But it will nevertheless do it if there is any money at all to be had.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_House#Disaster_recovery

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem

You're going to need to spell your point out a little more than just a link. If I manage to get in a position where I'm the only person in Texas selling power in a snowstorm I'm going to die filthy rich.

That is the opposite of the collective action problem. There are enormous rewards for an actor the less other people act. Which is one of the reasons bigger corporations do disaster planning, it lets them scoop up profits when prices are higher.

Capitalists don't give up easily if there is a person willing to spend money on something. They have flaws, but motivation to provide goods and services isn't one of them.

My point was that simple a-priori logic of the kind you offered regularly fails. A fast-food restaurant who wants to keeps its machines running has profit-driven feedback loops of a radically different nature than those of an energy market (esp. when such a market has natural monopolies).

And likewise, markets are amoral. If the "market" opts for a failure every decade over a higher-priced day-to-day run... this isnt "rational" or "correct" or "ethical" or whatever. The way a market happens to function is amoral.

You can make the argument that over fairly short time horizons in non-critical areas "meeting consumer demand" in most cases has a certain consequentialist justification. This doesnt carry over, a-priori to all possible cases.

Ie., it is quite reasonable for a society via a democratic expression of ethical judgement to say "the market is not here considering the long-term impact in the right ethical manner"... ie., that being without power when it's -20 outside & affecting the whole population in ways not priced in by the market is a *moral failure*.

It is the prerogative of the collective to say at once "here's how it should be", rather than via iterated interactions "here's how its happened to be".

No one gets a bonus because no disaster has happened in decades. Squeezing a percent or two out of a maintenance budget is exactly the kind of behavior that regularly is incentivized.

> Squeezing a percent or two out of a maintenance budget is exactly the kind of behavior that regularly is incentivized.

We're not talking a percent or two here. We've got people claiming that a company whose sole tactical purpose is to get energy to consumers failed sorta-on-purpose. That claim is more wild than some people in this thread realise. It amounts to giving up free money.

If they'd charged outrageous prices that would be one thing. But failure to supply power, by a company that makes money supplying power? This isn't an incentives problem, they were genuinely caught by surprise.

Arguing incompetence is one thing, but people are calling out incentives here without having good evidence of an incentives problem.

>It makes capitalist sense to do disaster planning.

Until a yet another black swan event happens that requires the government to step in and help them with the eventuality they didn't plan for. Like COVID. If there are two companies competing and only one of them pays to be resilient against disaster, they won't be able to compete on price and will lose market share.

Serious question, did you read any of the above comments, or TFA? My immediate reactions are "restaurants and power companies are sliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiightly different in their ownership, provision of services, capital costs, financing, profit-margins, regulatory structure, and whether-they're-a-natural-monopoly" and, perhaps more importantly, "we're in a comment section about utility-company capitalists abandoning everyone to their fates, and making billions doing it".

We're not in a comments section about a theorycrafted threat of that happening, or a comments section about twiddling incentives to encourage WH-like behaviour, we're in a comments section discussing the consequences of capitalist abandonment: namely, they made billions doing it.

> officials decided to bypass the market and, on Monday evening, manually set prices at the maximum of $9,000 per megawatt hour

You're trying to argue that this quote + greedy heartless capitalism -> give up and let the energy grid go dark.

That needs strong evidence. Occam's razor suggests they were genuinely caught off guard and they'll be better prepared next time. $9k/MWh is a very tempting price for someone who can have a generator set up on standby. Some people like making insane revenue. Possibly even some Texans. The price of electricity was basically infinity here.

>strong evidence

What actually happened is insufficient for you? Let me know when sweeping changes are made to prepare the gri--

>$9k/MWh is a very tempting price for someone who can have a generator set up on standby

Oh, I see -- the solution is to let the market "solve" it. The physical-world issues that led to that tempting price will wreak their havoc on the physical-world infrastructure the next time that tempting price is set, but the kind of physical-world prophylactics that could have prevented that tempting price are "too expensive" to implement. Rather than prevent the catastrophe, instead ensure that someone is poised to swoop in and profit from stabilizing some preventable chaos.

>Some people like making insane revenue

If the grid didn't go down, why, no one would be able to make $9k/MWh!

> What actually happened is insufficient for you?

Yeah. Duh. That is why I'm arguing that they were genuinely caught off guard and they'll be better prepared next time - because I don't think what happened is reflective of the incentives here.

> Rather than prevent the catastrophe, instead ensure that someone is poised to swoop in and profit from stabilizing some preventable chaos.

That doesn't make a lost of sense. If someone swoops in at the last minute and prevents the chaos it will still be prevented. And I'm not saying that the Texans are going to do that, just that it is one option. The existing operators might learn from this and harden their infrastructure.

As far as I can read this section, you seem to be hypothesising that there are two options:

1. Overengineer the average case.

2. Have a contingency plan.

And then asserting that 1 is the solution that is acceptable to you and that 2 would somehow be a bad outcome. I don't really understand your position if so - if having a contingency plan for emergencies is the preferred method of the market then that is cool. Good enough, probably cheap. Overengineering solutions is exactly the sort of thing that the free market is set up to avoid - it is wasteful. If it doesn't make economic sense to overengineer then it is much better to have a contingency plan - the average case is cheaper and there are plans and supplies on hand to deal with a crisis when one occurs.

>That doesn't make a lost of sense. If someone swoops in at the last minute and prevents the chaos it will still be prevented. And I'm not saying that the Texans are going to do that, just that it is one option. The existing operators might learn from this and harden their infrastructure.

No, I said that someone would "swoop in and *profit from stabilizing some preventable chaos*". You even fucking quoted me saying it! The comment is right above us! You even encouraged this outcome ("Some people like making insane revenue. Possibly even some Texans.")! That incredible misapprehension certainly doesn't make any sense to me, unless--

>I don't really understand your position if so

It's pretty clear you're doing ideological battle here. You're unwilling to face the recorded facts of the situation, let alone what your conversational interlocutor is actually saying, so you replace that with your own imagination. Indeed, you make an argument that you imagine me making, and then admit that you don't understand it -- isn't this definitionally a strawman? Why bother with this?

No matter your position on my position, it's pretty clear we're only ever going to talk past one another: your axiomatic assumption that the free market is the correct way to run a natural monopoly like a utility is IMO as wrong as your position on how the free market should have responded. It's only "overengineering the average case" if your instrumental goal is to "make money by providing power" -- if your instrumental goal is to "provide power, in exchange for money", the calculation changes entirely. Suddenly, it's not about winnowing another few percentage points out of a maintenence budget so some MBA can get a new car -- it's about securing the provision of a necessity of life, for a dollar or two added to the end-user's bill.

If you're still interesting in prosecuting our "discussion", I suggest you go answer this guy's question instead [0] -- if you do genuinely think that they were caught off guard, and that they'll improve the (proven to be fabulously profitable!!) situation in future, go explain it to him. It's not about what should happen or what might happen now, it's about what's already happened and what's just transpired.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30018584

> No, I said that someone would "swoop in and profit from stabilizing some preventable chaos". You even fucking quoted me saying it!

If someone has stabilised the crisis then it isn't really a problem for the consumers. In this case, stabilising the crisis involves keeping the grid up and running in an emergency situation. There isn't any point sitting around thumbtwiddling watching a brownout happen, electricity grids often operate at speeds measured in either Hertz or 15 minute windows.

> isn't this definitionally a strawman? Why bother with this?

It'll help you explain yourself if you have some hints about how I am reading your comment. If I just say "explain further" to someone then it is unclear what they need to expand upon. Plus it makes my position clearer and I enjoy typing.

And the dude's comment isn't something I feel a need to answer. I'm not arguing in favour of the Texas electricity providers, I'm arguing that "they've got an incentive to give up and let the grid go dark" is a pretty extreme guess, is probably wrong and at a minimum needs real evidence to support it. Maximum profit probably isn't achieved if the grid goes down. It is much more likely that the incentives align to keep the grid running 24-7-365 with a high tolerance for outlier events and this outage was just run of the mill incompetence in the face of change.

> It makes capitalist sense to do disaster planning.

Then explain the recurring failure of the Texas energy sector to do so.

aka Disaster Capitalism

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